Genre Watch: New Mysteries and Thrillers for the Kindle Reader

Spend less time searching for new genre fiction and more time reading it as I watch for newly-released genre fiction in the Kindle Store so you don't have to. Outstanding new releases in mystery and suspense fiction include:

Waking Hours by Lis Wiehl. Thomas Nelson, 2011. Print Length: 336 p. Amazon customer rating: 4 1/2 stars (5 reviews). Kindle edition $10.40. Text-to-Speech: Enabled. This is book one of the East Salem trilogy.

"Welcome to East Salem. A sleepy town with a history older than America where things are just a bit off. Where the supernatural bleeds into the everyday. And where a tragic murder mystery is underway. A high school girl is found dead in the town park. And where forensic psychiatrist Dani Harris wants answers. All the suspects are teenagers who were at the party with her the night before - but who woke up the next morning with no memory of what transpired. Former pro-football linebacker - and local celebrity - Tommy Gunderson finds himself drawn to the case. And to Dani - who he last spoke with on their one high school date forever ago..." - Publisher.

Farewell, Miss Zukas by Jo Dereske. June Creek Books, 2011. Print Length: 248 p. Amazon customer rating: 5 stars (2 reviews). Kindle edition $6.50. Text-to-Speech: Enabled. This is the 12th and last of the Miss Zukas mysteries. For more in-depth information about the first eleven volumes (all available in Kindle editions), please click here.

"...the chief finally pops the question to Miss Helma Zukas, librarian par excellence. But before Bellehaven, Washington can rejoice, Helma's mother and Aunt Em are robbed and the alleged robber lies dead - or does he? Helma and her artist friend Ruth are determined to discover the truth and recover the stolen items, including Aunt Em's mysterious Lithuanian carving." - Publisher.

Already Gone by John Rector. Thomas & Mercer, 2011. Print Length: 316 p. Amazon customer rating: 5 stars (3 reviews). Kindle edition $4.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.

"Jake Reese is a writing teacher at an American university. He lives in a small brick Tudor close to campus with his art buyer wife, Diane. His life is quiet. Ordinary even. And he likes it that way. But it wasn't always quiet. Jake's distant past was a life on the streets, inflicting damage and suffering on more people than he can count. And now someone from his past, it seems, has come looking for him. A raw, gripping thriller about the price paid for past sins, John Rector's third novel is a live wire that crackles with the intensity of a man who has nothing left to lose. When two men attack Jake in a parking lot and cut off his ring finger, he tries to dismiss it as an unlucky case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. But when events take a more sinister turn and Diane goes missing, Jake knows he can no longer hide from the truth." - Publisher.

The Gingerbread Bump-Off: A Fresh-Baked Mystery by Livia J. Washburn. NAL, 2011. Print Length: Amazon customer rating: none yet. Kindle edition $9.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled. This is book six in the author's Fresh-Baked mystery series that began with A Peach of a Murder.

"Not only will Phyllis Newsom's house be featured in the annual Christmas Jingle Bell Tour of Homes, she also has a Christmas Eve bridal shower and a New Year's Eve wedding to bake goodies for. But like her tasty treats, she rises to the occasion. Before the tour gets under way, Phyllis makes a gruesome discovery on her porch: someone has tried to kill her friend. As Santa's naughty list gets longer, Phyllis tries to catch a half-baked killer." - Publisher.

The Litigators by John Grisham. Doubleday, 2011. Print Length: 400 p. Amazon customer rating: 4 stars (24 reviews). Kindle edition $14.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.

"The partners at Finley & Figg - all two of them - often refer to themselves as 'a boutique law firm.' Boutique, as in chic, selective, and prosperous. They are, of course, none of these things. What they are is a two-bit operation always in search of their big break... And then change comes their way. More accurately, it stumbles in. David Zinc, a young but already burned-out attorney, walks away from his fast-track career at a fancy downtown firm, goes on a serious bender, and finds himself literally at the doorstep of our boutique firm. Once David sobers up and comes to grips with the fact that he’s suddenly unemployed, any job - even one with Finley & Figg -looks okay to him. With their new associate on board, F&F is ready to tackle a really big case, a case that could make the partners rich without requiring them to actually practice much law. It almost seems too good to be true. And it is..." - Publisher.

As The Pig Turns: An Agatha Raisin Mystery by M. C. Beaton. Minotaur Books, 2011. Print Length: 304 p. Amazon customer rating: 4 1/2 stars (6 reviews). Kindle edition $11.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled. This is book twenty-two in the author's popular Agatha Raisin series that began with The Quiche of Death.

"Winter Parva is a 'picturesque' (touristy) Cotswold village with gift shops, a medieval market hall, and thatched cottages. After a disappointing Christmas season, the parish council has decided to hold a special event in January, complete with old-fashioned costumes, morris dancing, and a pig roast on the village green. Always one for a good roasting, Agatha Raisin organizes an outing to enjoy the merriment. The rotary spit turning over a bed of blazing charcoals is sure to please on this foggy and blistery evening. But as the fog lifts slightly, the sharp-eyed Agatha notices something peculiar about the pig: a tattoo of a heart with an arrow through it and the name Amy..." - Publisher.

Stolen Souls: A Jack Lennon Investigation Set in Northern Ireland by Stuart Neville. Soho Crime, 2011. Print Length: 354 p. Amazon customer rating: 4 stars (12 reviews). Kindle edition $9.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.

"Detective Inspector Jack Lennon of the Belfast Police has watched the developing cooperation between Northern Ireland's Loyalist gangs and immigrant Lithuanian criminals with unease. The Lithuanians traffic women from Eastern Europe and Asia for the Loyalists' brothels, and they're all making big money in spite of the recession that has stopped Northern Ireland's peace boom in its tracks. Lennon has a more intimate knowledge of the city's brothels than he'll ever admit, but the surge in trafficked girls makes him question his lifestyle, especially considering he has his daughter, Ellen, to care for now. When a Lithuanian trafficker turns up dead on Christmas Eve with a shard of glass embedded in his throat, Lennon's plans to spend the holiday with Ellen are put in jeopardy..."
_______________________

Note to readers: The book prices quoted here are the Amazon.com prices in effect at the time of the blog posting. Please follow the links to the individual book to check the current price.


see more dog and puppy pictures

Murder in Middle English: Mysteries for the Kindle Reader Set in Medieval Times

As an undergraduate I remember taking an English literature course in which we studied Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, a classic work of medieval literature. All the students in the class were required to memorize the book's Prologue in the original Middle English and "audition" it for the professor in his office.

In spite of this somewhat nerve-wracking experience, I still find the Middle Ages one of the most fascinating periods in European history. If you too enjoy reading about this time period - and are a murder mystery aficionado, here are a few historical mysteries I'd recommend:

The Good Knight: A Medieval Mystery, by Sarah Woodbury. The Morgan-Stanwood Publishing Group, 2011. Print Length: 306 p. Amazon customer rating: 5 stars (4 reviews). Kindle edition $3.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"Intrigue, suspicion, and rivalry among the royal princes casts a shadow on the court of Owain, king of north Wales…The year is 1143 and King Owain seeks to unite his daughter in marriage with an allied king. But when the groom is murdered on the way to his wedding, the bride’s brother tasks his two best detectives - Gareth, a knight, and Gwen, the daughter of the court bard - with bringing the killer to justice. And once blame for the murder falls on Gareth himself, Gwen must continue her search for the truth alone, finding unlikely allies in foreign lands, and ultimately uncovering a conspiracy that will shake the political foundations of Wales." - Publisher.

The Unquiet Bones: The First Chronicle of Hugh de Singleton, Surgeon, by Melvin Starr. Monarch Books, 2008. Print Length: 256 p Amazon customer rating: 4 1/2 stars (49 reviews). Kindle edition $9.68. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.

"Hugh of Singleton, fourth son of a minor knight, has been educated as a clerk, usually a prelude to taking holy orders. However, feeling no certain calling despite a lively faith, he turns to the profession of surgeon, training in Paris and then hanging out his sign in Oxford. A local lord asks him to track the killer of a young woman whose bones have been found in the castle cesspit. She is identified as the impetuous missing daughter of a local blacksmith, and her young man, whom she had provoked very publicly, is in due course arrested and sentenced at the Oxford assizes. From there the tale unfolds, with graphic medical procedures, droll medieval wit, misdirection, ambition, romantic distractions and a consistent underlying Christian compassion." - http://melstarr.net/

The Killer of Pilgrims, by Susanna Gregory. Hachette, 2010. Print Length: 416 p. Amazon customer rating: 4 1/2 stars (3 reviews). Kindle edition $9.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.

"British author Gregory again displays her mastery of complex storytelling and period detail in her 16th mystery set in 14th-century Cambridge, the home of doctor, instructor, and corpse examiner Matthew Bartholomew... Amid an atmosphere of increasing tension between Cambridge's colleges and the less affluent hostels, Bartholomew must identify the killer of taverner John Drax, who was initially believed the victim of an accident, until the physician found a fatal stab wound on his body. For many, the book's pleasures will stem less from the resolution of the various interlocking puzzles than from the utterly convincing portrait of an England still recovering from the great pestilence of the previous decade, complete with familiar complaints about the timeliness of home contractors' work and avaricious people seeking to profit from the tragic plague..." - Publishers Weekly.

Mistress of the Art of Death, by Ariana Franklin. Berkley, 2007. Print Length: 400 p. Amazon customer rating: 4 stars (162 reviews). Kindle edition $12.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.

"In medieval Cambridge, England, Adelia, a female forensics expert, is summoned by King Henry II to investigate a series of gruesome murders that has wrongly implicated the Jewish population, yielding even more tragic results. As Adelia's investigation takes her behind the closed doors of the country's churches, the killer prepares to strike again." - Publisher.





The Demon's Parchment: A Medieval Noir, by Jeri Westerson. Minotaur Books, 2010. Print Length: 320 p. Amazon customer rating: 4 1/2 stars (7 reviews). Kindle edition $9.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.

"In fourteenth century London, Crispin Guest is a disgraced knight convicted of treason and stripped of his land, title and his honor. He has become known as the 'Tracker' - a man who can find anything, can solve any puzzle and, with the help of his apprentice, Jack Tucker, an orphaned street urchin with a thief ’s touch - will do so for a price. But this time, even Crispin is wary of taking on his most recent client. Jacob of Provencal is a Jewish physician at the King’s court, even though all Jews were expelled from England nearly a century before. Jacob wants Crispin to find stolen parchments that might be behind the recent, ongoing, gruesome murders of young boys, parchments that someone might have used to bring forth a demon which now stalks the streets and alleys of London." - Publisher.

Midsummer Crown, by Kate Sedley. Severn House, 2011. Print Length: 256 p. Amazon customer rating: 4 1/2 stars (2 reviews). Kindle edition $9.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.

"Set in fifteenth-century England, Sedley's new Roger the Chapman mystery has Roger returning to Bristol, where he unraveled a thorny mystery for his patron, the Duke of Gloucester. Ready to settle back into peaceful domesticity, Roger barely has time to set down his peddler's pack before the duke's messenger arrives with new orders. Roger is to return to London, this time to solve the kidnapping of a young prince and the murder of his tutor. But there are few clues, and every potential lead turns into a dead-end until, by chance, Roger stumbles on a secret with its roots in ancient paganism that just might unlock the mystery. Cleverly crafted, with authentic period detail, an accurate and well-constructed historical context..." - Booklist.

Counterfeit Madam: A Gil Cunningham Mystery set in Medieval Scotland, by Pat McIntosh. Soho Constable, 2011. Print Length: 288 p. Amazon customer rating: 4 1/2 stars (2 reviews). Kindle edition $14.00. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.

"Gil Cunningham had hoped that the first time he set foot in the brothel on the Drygate it would also be his last, but by the time all was settled he felt quite at home within its artfully painted chambers. The bawdy house, along with the neighboring property, is offered to Gil and his wife Alys by the forceful Dame Isabella. But matters are confused by an outbreak of counterfeit coins in Glasgow, which Gil has been ordered to investigate. Then Dame Isabella is found dead in strange circumstances, and the more Gil pursues the cause of her death, the more false coins he finds..." - Publisher.

The Alehouse Murders: A Templar Knight Mystery, by Maureen Ash. Berkley, 2007. Print Length: 275 p. Amazon customer rating: 4 stars (18 reviews). Kindle edition $7.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.

"After eight years of captivity in the Holy Land, Templar Bascot de Marins escapes with injuries to his body and soul. Now on a sojourn at Lincoln Castle, he hopes to regain his strength, and mend his waning faith - but not even the peace of God's countryside is safe from the mortal crimes of man. For what appears to be the grisly end to a drunken row is in fact a cunning and baffling crime." - Publisher.

Nightshade: A Hugh Corbett Medieval Mystery, by P. C. Doherty. Minotaur Books, 2011. Print Length: 304 p. Amazon customer rating: 5 stars (2 reviews). Kindle edition $9.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.

"Whodunits don't get much better than this outstanding historical... Edward I dispatches Corbett, keeper of the secret seal, to Essex to recover an ornate cross claimed by the Templars from Lord Oliver Scrope. The king also wants Corbett to censure Scrope for exceeding his authority in ordering the massacre of the members of a religious sect the orthodox Scrope had labeled heretical. On arrival, Corbett finds Scrope's community plagued by a killer known as Sagittarius, who has already claimed multiple victims. The murderous archer has created an atmosphere of terror with his apparently random attacks, heralded with the blast of a hunter's horn... The first-rate pacing will have readers racing through the book to learn the truth, which the author has artfully concealed." - Publishers Weekly.

Jester Leaps In: A Medieval Mystery, by Alan Gordon. Minotaur Books, 2010. Print Length: 291 p. Amazon customer rating: 4 1/2 stars (10 reviews). Kindle edition $6.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.

"In 13th century Europe, political turmoil is the order of the day and the Fool's Guild and its agents - jesters, jugglers, and knaves to a man - works behind the scenes to manipulate events, trying to maintain a balance of power. Theophilos, a member of the Guild known by many names, is still recovering from his last mission during which he was severely wounded and nearly lost his life but, in the person of Viola, found himself an apprentice and a wife. But there is no rest for the wicked. While he is recovering on the Dalmatian coast, the Guild approaches him with another mission. A crusade is being launched, with Venice as the staging ground, but some believe that Venice means to turn it to it's own ends. At the same time, there is trouble in Byzantine throne - a pretender to the throne is gathering European backers. And to make matters worse, all of the Guild's agents in Constantinople have gone suddenly and mysteriously missing." - Publisher.
_______________________

Note to readers: The book prices quoted here are the Amazon.com prices in effect at the time of the blog posting. Please follow the links to the individual book to check the current price.


see more Historic LOL

What People Magazine is Reading This Week (Oct 31st Issue)

For those Kindle readers who, like me, read for entertainment, scanning the book reviews in People magazine is good way to check out new people-related books - celebrity bios, popular novels, absorbing nonfiction - just hitting bookstore shelves. Featured in the October 31st issue of People:

Holy Ghost Girl: A Memoir, by Donna M. Johnson. Gotham Books, 2011. Print Length: 278 p. MEMOIR. Amazon customer rating: 4 1/2 stars (10 reviews). People's slant: "Her tale reads like a divinely taut thriller, revealing a surreal world of faith, humor and heartbreak." Kindle edition $12.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.

"She was just three years old when her mother signed on as the organist of tent revivalist David Terrell, and before long, Donna Johnson was part of the hugely popular evangelical preacher's inner circle. At seventeen, she left the ministry for good, with a trove of stranger-than-fiction memories. A homecoming like no other, Holy Ghost Girl brings to life miracles, exorcisms, and faceoffs with the Ku Klux Klan. And that's just what went on under the tent. As Terrell became known worldwide during the 1960s and '70s, the caravan of broken-down cars and trucks that made up his ministry evolved into fleets of Mercedes and airplanes. The glories of the Word mixed with betrayals of the flesh and Donna's mother bore Terrell's children in one of the several secret households he maintained. Thousands of followers, dubbed Terrellites" by the press, left their homes to await the end of the world in cultlike communities. Jesus didn't show, but the IRS did...Recounted with deadpan observations and surreal detail, Holy Ghost Girl bypasses easy judgment to articulate a rich world in which the mystery of faith and human frailty share a surprising and humorous coexistence.

Sybil Exposed: The Extraordinary Story Behind the Famous Multiple Personality Case, by Debbie Nathan. Free Press, 2011. Print Length: 320 p. NONFICTION. Amazon customer rating: 3 stars (20 reviews). People's slant: "...a gripping history of crackpot psychiatry." Kindle edition $12.99. Text-to-Speech: Disabled.

"Sybil: a name that conjures up enduring fascination for legions of obsessed fans who followed the nonfiction blockbuster from 1973 and the TV movie based on it - starring Sally Field and Joanne Woodward - about a woman named Sybil with sixteen different personalities. Sybil became both a pop phenomenon and a revolutionary force in the psychotherapy industry. The book rocketed multiple personality disorder (MPD) into public consciousness and played a major role in having the diagnosis added to the psychiatric bible, Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. But what do we really know about how Sybil came to be? In her news-breaking book Sybil Exposed, journalist Debbie Nathan gives proof that the allegedly true story was largely fabricated. The actual identity of Sybil (Shirley Mason) has been available for some years, as has the idea that the book might have been exaggerated. But in Sybil Exposed, Nathan reveals what really powered the legend: a trio of women - the willing patient, her ambitious shrink, and the imaginative journalist who spun their story into bestseller gold." - Publisher.

1Q84, by Haruki Murakami. Translated by Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel. Knopf, 2011. Print Length: 944 p. NOVEL. Amazon customer rating: 4 stars (4 reviews). People's slant: "If you haven't previously read Murakami - Japan's most popular novelist - this is a good introduction to his Lewis-Carroll-meets-Mister-Rogers style, a distinctive blend of the wild and the ordinary that can be as engaging as Wonderland itself." Kindle edition $14.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.

"The year is 1984 and the city is Tokyo. A young woman named Aomame follows a taxi driver’s enigmatic suggestion and begins to notice puzzling discrepancies in the world around her. She has entered, she realizes, a parallel existence, which she calls 1Q84... Meanwhile, an aspiring writer named Tengo takes on a suspect ghostwriting project. He becomes so wrapped up with the work and its unusual author that, soon, his previously placid life begins to come unraveled. As Aomame’s and Tengo’s narratives converge over the course of this single year, we learn of the profound and tangled connections that bind them ever closer: a beautiful, dyslexic teenage girl with a unique vision; a mysterious religious cult that instigated a shoot-out with the metropolitan police; a reclusive, wealthy dowager who runs a shelter for abused women; a hideously ugly private investigator; a mild-mannered yet ruthlessly efficient bodyguard; and a peculiarly insistent television-fee collector. A love story, a mystery, a fantasy, a novel of self-discovery, a dystopia to rival George Orwell’s - 1Q84 is Haruki Murakami’s most ambitious undertaking yet..." - from the hardcover edition.

Mentioned Briefly:

An Unbroken Bond: The Untold Story of How the 658 Cantor Fitzgerald Families Faced the Tragedy of 9/11 and Beyond, by Edie Lutnick. Foreword by Clarence B. Jones. Emergence Press, 2011. Print Length: 326 p. NONFICTION. Amazon customer rating: 5 stars (13 reviews). Kindle edition $9.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.

"On September 11th, 658 men and women at Cantor Fitzgerald found themselves trapped together in One World Trade Center. None would make it out alive. Among them was Edie Lutnick's brother Gary, whom she had raised when their parents died at an early age. This is the story of the victims, the families and how they came together bonded by a tragic fate. But the story doesn't end there. In the aftermath of the attacks, Edie answered the call from her other brother, Cantor Fitzgerald CEO Howard Lutnick, to create a fund for the firm's families who had lost loved ones. Over the past decade Edie and Howard have found themselves in a fight to not just give aid and comfort to the larger Cantor family, but also to honor the memory of countless victims. What they weren't expecting was to find a barrage of issues in their way from political jockeying to class biases. This is the powerful, sometimes infuriating and ultimately heartrending story of the mission to fulfill an important legacy, and give meaning to the lives of the victims of 9/11." - Publisher.

Searching for Beauty: The Life of Millicent Rogers, by Cherie Burns. St. Martin's Press, 2011. Print Length: 384 p. BIOGRAPHY. Amazon customer rating: 4 stars (8 reviews). Kindle edition $14.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.

"A fascinating portrait of the Standard Oil heiress and legendary American trendsetter Millicent Rogers. Nobody knew how to live the high life like Millicent Rogers. Born into luxury, she lived in a whirl of beautiful homes, European vacations, exquisite clothing and handsome men. In Searching for Beauty, Cherie Burns chronicles Rogers's glittering life from her days as a young girl afflicted with rheumatic fever to her debutante debut and her Taos finale. A rebellious icon of the age, she eloped with a penniless baron, danced tangos in European nightclubs, divorced, remarried and romanced, among others, Clark Gable. Her romantic conquests, though, paled in comparison to her triumph in the fashion world where she electrified the fashionistas by becoming the muse to designer Charles James, appearing in Vogue and Harper's Bazaar and - at the end of her life - retreating to Taos, New Mexico where she popularized Southwestern style." - Publisher.
________________________

Note to readers: The book prices quoted here are the Amazon.com prices in effect at the time of the blog posting. Please follow the links to the individual book to check the current price.


see more Historic LOL

Books They're Talking About: Kindle Books in the Media

Media interviews are a popular way for writers to introduce new books they hope will catch the viewer's eye and generate interest in their work. Here's a selection of forthcoming Kindle books by authors scheduled for interviews on TV and radio programs. Books are arranged in chronological order by the date of the scheduled interview.

On CBS's 60 Minutes (Oct 16, 2011)

Van Gogh: The Life, by Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith. Random House, 2011. Print Length: 976 p. Amazon customer rating: 5 stars (1 review). Kindle edition $19.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"Working with the full cooperation of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, Naifeh and Smith have accessed a wealth of previously untapped materials. While drawing liberally from the artist’s famously eloquent letters, they have also delved into hundreds of unpublished family correspondences, illuminating with poignancy the wanderings of Van Gogh’s troubled, restless soul. Though countless books have been written about Van Gogh, and though the broad outlines of his tragedy have long inhabited popular culture, no serious, ambitious examination of his life has been attempted in more than seventy years. Naifeh and Smith have re-created Van Gogh’s life with an astounding vividness and psychological acuity that bring a completely new and sympathetic understanding to this unique artistic genius whose signature images of sunflowers and starry nights have won a permanent place in the human imagination." - Publisher.

On NPR's All Things Considered (Oct 21, 2011):

Scenes from Village Life, by Amos Oz. Translated from the Hebrew by Nicholas de Lange. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011. Print Length: 192 p. Amazon customer rating: 4 stars (14 reviews). Kindle edition $9.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.

"A portrait of a fictional village, by one of the world’s most admired writers. In the village of Tel Ilan, something is off kilter. An elderly man complains to his daughter that he hears the sound of digging under his house at night. Could it be his tenant, a young Arab? But then the tenant hears the mysterious digging sounds too. The mayor receives a note from his wife: 'Don’t worry about me.' He looks all over, no sign of her. The veneer of new wealth around the village - gourmet restaurants and art galleries, a winery - cannot conceal abandoned outbuildings, disused air raid shelters, rusting farm tools, and trucks left wherever they stopped. Amos Oz’s novel-in-stories is a brilliant, unsettling glimpse of what goes on beneath the surface of everyday life...a parable for Israel, and for all of us." - Publisher.

On NPR's Weekend Edition (Oct 22, 2011):

Midnight Rising: John Brown and the Raid That Sparked the Civil War, by Tony Horwitz. Henry Holt and Co., 2011. Print Length: 384 p. Amazon customer rating: 4 1/2 stars (20 reviews). Kindle edition $12.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.

"Plotted in secret, launched in the dark, John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry was a pivotal moment in U.S. history. But few Americans know the true story of the men and women who launched a desperate strike at the slaveholding South. Now, Midnight Rising portrays Brown's uprising in vivid color, revealing a country on the brink of explosive conflict. Brown, the descendant of New England Puritans, saw slavery as a sin against America's founding principles. Unlike most abolitionists, he was willing to take up arms, and in 1859 he prepared for battle at a hideout in Maryland, joined by his teenage daughter, three of his sons, and a guerrilla band that included former slaves and a dashing spy. On October 17, the raiders seized Harpers Ferry, stunning the nation and prompting a counterattack led by Robert E. Lee." - Publisher.

On CBS's 60 Minutes (Oct 23, 2011):

Steve Jobs, by Walter Isaacson. Simon & Schuster, 2011. Print Length: 656 p. Amazon customer rating: 4 1/2 stars (14 reviews). Kindle edition $16.99. Text-to-Speech: Disabled.

"Based on more than forty interviews with Jobs conducted over two years - as well as interviews with more than a hundred family members, friends, adversaries, competitors, and colleagues - Walter Isaacson has written a riveting story of the roller-coaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing, and digital publishing. Although Jobs cooperated with this book, he asked for no control over what was written nor even the right to read it before it was published. He put nothing off-limits. He encouraged the people he knew to speak honestly. And Jobs speaks candidly, sometimes brutally so, about the people he worked with and competed against. His friends, foes, and colleagues provide an unvarnished view of the passions, perfectionism, obsessions, artistry, devilry, and compulsion for control that shaped his approach to business and the innovative products that resulted." - Publisher

On C-SPAN2's Book TV (Oct 23, 2011):

A Point in Time: The Search for Redemption in this Life and the Next, by David Horowitz. Regnery Publishing, 2011. Print Length: 256 p. Amazon customer rating: 4 stars (8 reviews). Kindle edition $9.18. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.

"New York Times bestselling author David Horowitz is famous for his conversion from 1960s radicalism. In A Point in Time, his lyrical yet startling new book, he offers meditations on an even deeper conversion, one which touches on the very essence of every human life. Part memoir and part philosophical reflection, A Point in Time focuses on man’s inevitable search for meaning - and how for those without religious belief, that search often leads to a faith in historical progress, one that is bound to disappoint. Horowitz remembers his father, a political radical who put his faith in just such a redemptive future. He examines this hope through the other great figure who organizes these reflections, the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky, whose writings foreshadowed the great tragedies of the social revolutions to come. Horowitz draws on eternal themes: the need we have to make sense out of the lives we have been given, our desire to repair the injustices we encounter, and the consequences of our mortality." - Publisher.

On C-SPAN2's Book TV (Oct 23, 2011):

Cartel: The Coming Invasion of Mexico's Drug Wars, by Sylvia Longmire. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011. Print Length: 256 p. Amazon customer rating: 4 1/2 stars (6 reviews). Kindle edition $12.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.

"Having followed Mexico's cartels for years, border security expert Sylvia Longmire takes us deep into the heart of their world to witness a dangerous underground that will do whatever it takes to deliver drugs to a willing audience of American consumers. The cartels have grown increasingly bold in recent years, building submarines to move up the coast of Central America and digging elaborate tunnels that both move drugs north and carry cash and U.S. high-powered assault weapons back to fuel the drug war. Channeling her long experience working on border issues, Longmire brings to life the very real threat of Mexican cartels operating not just along the southwest border, but deep inside every corner of the United States. She also offers real solutions to the critical problems facing Mexico and the United States... " - Publisher.

On NPR's The Diane Rehm Show (Oct 25, 2011):

Suicide of a Superpower: Will America Survive to 2025?, by Patrick J. Buchanan. Thomas Dunne Books, 2011. Print Length: 496 p. Amazon customer rating: 4 1/2 stars (16 reviews). Kindle edition $14.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.

"The author of six New York Times bestsellers traces the disintegration to three historic changes: America’s loss of her cradle faith, Christianity; the moral, social, and cultural collapse that have followed from that loss; and the slow death of the people who created and ruled the nation. America was born a Western Christian republic, writes Buchanan, but is being transformed into a multiracial, multicultural, multilingual, multiethnic stew of a nation that has no successful precedent in the history of the world. Where once we celebrated the unity, the melting pot and shared experience, that the Depression and World War gave us, our elites today proclaim, 'Our diversity is our greatest strength!' - even as racial, religious, and ethnic diversity are tearing nations to pieces. Less and less do we Americans have in common. More and more do we fight over religion, morality, politics, history, and heroes. And as our nation disintegrates, our government is failing in its fundamental duties, unable to defend our borders, balance our budgets, or win our wars. How Americans are killing the country they profess to love, and the fate that awaits us if we do not turn around, is what Suicide of a Superpower is all about." - Publisher.

On NPR's The Diane Rehm Show (Oct 27, 2011)

The Darwin Economy: Liberty, Competition, and the Common Good, by Robert Frank. Princeton University Press, 2011. Print Length: 256 p. Amazon customer rating: 4 1/2 stars (6 reviews). Kindle edition $14.23. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.

Who was the greater economist - Adam Smith or Charles Darwin? The question seems absurd. Darwin, after all, was a naturalist, not an economist. But Robert Frank, New York Times economics columnist and best-selling author of The Economic Naturalist, predicts that within the next century Darwin will unseat Smith as the intellectual founder of economics. The reason, Frank argues, is that Darwin's understanding of competition describes economic reality far more accurately than Smith's. Smith's theory of the invisible hand, which says that competition channels self-interest for the common good, is probably the most widely cited argument today in favor of unbridled competition- - and against regulation, taxation, and even government itself. But what if Smith's idea was almost an exception to the general rule of competition? That's what Frank argues, resting his case on Darwin's insight that individual and group interests often diverge sharply. Far from creating a perfect world, economic competition often leads to 'arms races,' encouraging behaviors that not only cause enormous harm to the group but also provide no lasting advantages for individuals, since any gains tend to be relative and mutually offsetting. The good news is that we have the ability to tame the Darwin economy..." - Publisher.
_______________________

Note to readers: The book prices quoted here are the Amazon.com prices in effect at the time of the blog posting. Please follow the links to the individual book to check the current price.

Let Someone Else Rough It: Vicarious Adventure Travel for Kindle Readers

Thanks to the Interstate Highway System, it is now possible to travel across the country from coast to coast without seeing anything. - Charles Kuralt.

The great thing about traveling vicariously is that you can go wherever you like without worrying about passports, airport security checks, pre-trip vaccinations, or struggling to find the words in another language when you really, really need to find a bathroom fast. When security is not an issue, why not travel to Kazakhstan instead of Kansas or to Medieval England instead of today's Britain? The world can be your oyster when you read about it on your Kindle. Here are some places to start:

The Unconquered: In Search of the Amazon's Last Uncontacted Tribes , by Scott Wallace. Crown, 2011. Print Length: 512 p. Amazon customer rating: 4 1/2 stars (23 reviews). Kindle edition $12.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.
"Even today there remain tribes in the far reaches of the Amazon rainforest that have avoided contact with modern civilization. Deliberately hiding from the outside world, they are the unconquered, the last survivors of an ancient culture that predates the arrival of Columbus in the New World. In this gripping first-person account of adventure and survival, author Scott Wallace chronicles an expedition into the Amazon’s uncharted depths, discovering the rainforest’s secrets while moving ever closer to a possible encounter with one such tribe - the mysterious flecheiros, or 'People of the Arrow,' seldom-glimpsed warriors known to repulse all intruders with showers of deadly arrows. On assignment for National Geographic, Wallace joins Brazilian explorer Sydney Possuelo at the head of a thirty-four-man team that ventures deep into the unknown in search of the tribe. Laced with lessons from anthropology and the Amazon’s own convulsed history, and boasting a Conradian cast of unforgettable characters..."

The Safari Companion, by Richard Estes. Chelsea Green Publishing, 2011. Print Length: 459 p. Amazon customer rating: 4 1/2 stars (36 reviews). Kindle edition $16.50. This title has complex layouts and has been optimized for reading on devices with larger screens such as Kindle DX, Kindle for PC/Mac, and Kindle for iPad. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.

"Anyone who goes on safari will want to make room in his or her suitcase for this treasure. Estes, who is affiliated with Harvard University and the Smithsonian Institute as a research associate, spent over eight years doing fieldwork in Africa and over 17 years leading safaris. His admirable qualifications as an expert on the social ecology of African mammals are reflected in the text, which describes approximately 86 species of African mammals. Essential for any traveler to Africa, any student of animals or behavior, any zoo visitor, and any size public library." - Library Journal.

At the Tomb of the Inflatable Pig: Travels Through Paraguay, by John Gimlette. Vintage, 2011. Print Length: 400 p. Amazon customer rating: 3 1/2 stars (49 reviews). Kindle edition $9.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.

"A wildly humorous account of the author's travels across Paraguay - South America's darkly fabled, little-known 'island surrounded by land.' Rarely visited by tourists and barely touched by global village sprawl, Paraguay remains a mystery to outsiders. Think of this small nation and your mind is likely to jump to Nazis, dictators, and soccer. Now, John Gimlette’s eye-opening book - equal parts travelogue, history, and unorthodox travel guide - breaches the boundaries of this isolated land and illuminates a little-understood place and its people. It is a wonderfully animated telling of Paraguay's story: of cannibals, Jesuits, and sixteenth-century Anabaptists; of Victorian Australian socialists and talented smugglers; of dictators and their mad mistresses; bloody wars and Utopian settlements; and of lives transplanted from Japan, Britain, Poland, Russia, Germany, Ireland, Korea, and the United States." - Publisher.

Running Away to Home: Our Family's Journey to Croatia in Search of Who We Are, Where We Came From, and What Really Matters, by Jennifer Wilson. St. Martin's Press, 2011. Print Length: 336 p. Amazon customer rating: 4 1/2 stars (10 reviews). Kindle edition $12.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.

"Jim and Jen had always dreamed of taking a family sabbatical in another country, so when they lost half their savings in the stock-market crash, it seemed like just a crazy enough time to do it. High on wanderlust, they left the troubled landscape of contemporary America for the Croatian mountain village of Mrkopalj, the land of Jennifer's ancestors. It was a village that seemed hermetically sealed for the last one hundred years, with a population of eight hundred (mostly drunken) residents and a herd of sheep milling around the post office. For several months they lived like locals, from milking the neighbor's cows to eating roasted pig on a spit to desperately seeking the village recipe for bootleg liquor. As the Wilson-Hoff family struggled to stay sane (and warm), what they found was much deeper and bigger than themselves." - Publisher.

Dork Whore: My Travels Through Asia as a Twenty-Year-Old Pseudo-Virgin, by Iris Bahr. Bloomsbury, 2008. Print Length: 224 p. Amazon customer rating: 4 1/2 stars (14 reviews). Kindle edition $8.58. Text-to-Speech: Disabled.

"Fresh out of the Israeli Army, twenty-year-old Iris Bahr decides to follow the footsteps of many before her and backpack through Asia. Only unlike the average traveler, she has more in mind than just seeing the sights: she is on a desperate mission to lose her virginity. Dork Whore is a fresh and funny memoir about a young woman whose quirky personality and embarrassing neuroses always seem to get in the way of her getting what she wants. As Iris lands in hotel rooms in Bangkok, rides scooters out of opium-fogged compounds hidden in the jungle, and antagonizes an impromptu tour group in Vietnam, she begins to realize that the greatest obstacle she'll have to overcome isn't losing her virginity, but coming to terms with the reasons for her need to be accepted..." - Publisher.

_______________________

Note to readers: The book prices quoted here are the Amazon.com prices in effect at the time of the blog posting. Please follow the links to the individual book to check the current price.

A Week of Entertainment: Kindle Books Reviewed in Entertainment Weekly's October 14th/21st Issue

Each week Entertainment Weekly reviews a small selection of popular new books. Titles available for the Kindle reviewed in the October 14th/21st issue include:


Daughter of Smoke and Bone, by Laini Taylor. Little, Brown Books for Young Readers, 2011. Print length: 432 p. YOUNG ADULT. EW's slant: "The smartly plotted, surprising, and fiercely compelling read will hook you from its opening pages." Amazon customer rating: 5 stars (114 reviews). Kindle edition $9.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.

"Around the world, black handprints are appearing on doorways, scorched there by winged strangers who have crept through a slit in the sky. In a dark and dusty shop, a devil's supply of human teeth grown dangerously low. And in the tangled lanes of Prague, a young art student is about to be caught up in a brutal otherwordly war. Meet Karou. She fills her sketchbooks with monsters that may or may not be real; she's prone to disappearing on mysterious 'errands'; she speaks many languages - not all of them human; and her bright blue hair actually grows out of her head that color. Who is she? That is the question that haunts her, and she's about to find out..." - Publisher.

The Outlaw Album: Stories, by Daniel Woodrell. Little, Brown and Company, 2011. Print length: 176 p. SHORT STORIES. EW's slant: "...in his best tales, the human desperation behind the violence is gripping." Amazon customer rating: 5 stars (7 reviews). Kindle edition $11.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.

"Daniel Woodrell is able to lend uncanny logic to harsh, even criminal behavior in this wrenching collection of stories. Desperation - both material and psychological - motivates his characters. A husband cruelly avenges the killing of his wife's pet; an injured rapist is cared for by a young girl, until she reaches her breaking point; a disturbed veteran of Iraq is murdered for his erratic behavior; an outsider's house is set on fire by an angry neighbor. There is also the tenderness and loyalty of the vulnerable in these stories - between spouses, parents and children, siblings, and comrades in arms - which brings the troubled, sorely tested cast of characters to vivid, relatable life..." - Publisher.

Le Freak: An Upside Down Story of Family, Disco, and Destiny, by Nile Rodgers. Spiegel & Grau, 2011. Print length: 336 p. MEMOIR. Amazon customer rating: 4 stars (13 reviews). Kindle edition $12.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.

"But before he reinvented pop music, Nile Rodgers invented himself. He was born into a mixed-race, bicoastal family of dope-fiend bohemians who taught him everything he needed to know about love, loss, fashion, art, music, and the subversive power of underground culture. The stars of the scene were his glamorous teenage mom and heroin-addicted Jewish stepfather, but there were also monkeys, voodoo orishas, jazz cats, and serial killers in the mix. By the time he was sixteen, Nile was on his own, busking through the sixties, half-hippie and half–Black Panther. He jammed with Jimi Hendrix, rocked out at Max’s Kansas City, toured with Big Bird on Sesame Street’s road show, and played in the legendary Apollo Theater house band behind history’s greatest soul singers. And then one night, he discovered disco. Le Freak is the fascinating inside story of pop and its tangled roots, narrated by the man who absorbed everything in his topsy-turvy life - the pain and euphoria and fear and love - and turned it into some of the most sparklingly ebullient pop music ever recorded." - from the hardcover edition.

The Marriage Plot, by Jeffrey Eugenides. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011. Print length: 416 p. NOVEL. EW's slant: "...there are serious pleasures here for people who love to read: diamond-sharp observations and dazzling sentences that nearly justify the nine-year wait." Amazon customer rating: 4 stars (11 reviews). Kindle edition $12.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.

"It’s the early 1980s - the country is in a deep recession, and life after college is harder than ever. In the cafés on College Hill, the wised-up kids are inhaling Derrida and listening to Talking Heads. But Madeleine Hanna, dutiful English major, is writing her senior thesis on Jane Austen and George Eliot, purveyors of the marriage plot that lies at the heart of the greatest English novels. As Madeleine tries to understand why 'it became laughable to read writers like Cheever and Updike, who wrote about the suburbia Madeleine and most of her friends had grown up in, in favor of reading the Marquis de Sade, who wrote about deflowering virgins in eighteenth-century France,' real life, in the form of two very different guys, intervenes. Leonard Bankhead - charismatic loner, college Darwinist, and lost Portland boy - suddenly turns up in a semiotics seminar, and soon Madeleine finds herself in a highly charged erotic and intellectual relationship with him. At the same time, her old 'friend' Mitchell Grammaticus - who’s been reading Christian mysticism and generally acting strange - resurfaces, obsessed with the idea that Madeleine is destined to be his mate..." - Publisher.

The Sense of an Ending, by Julian Barnes. Knopf, 2011. Print Length: 176 p. NOVEL. Amazon customer rating: 4 stars (18 reviews). EW's slant: "...the many truths he highlights make it worthy of a careful read." Kindle edition $11.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.

"This intense new novel follows a middle-aged man as he contends with a past he has never much thought about - until his closest childhood friends return with a vengeance, one of them from the grave, another maddeningly present. Tony Webster thought he’d left all this behind as he built a life for himself, and by now his marriage and family and career have fallen into an amicable divorce and retirement. But he is then presented with a mysterious legacy that obliges him to reconsider a variety of things he thought he’d understood all along, and to revise his estimation of his own nature and place in the world. " - from the hardcover edition. Winner of the Man Booker Prize (2011).

Zone One, by Colson Whitehead. Doubleday, 2011. Print length: 272 p. NOVEL. EW's slant: "a lovely piece of writing that happens to be about hordes of homicidal undead." Amazon customer rating: 3 stars (37 reviews). Kindle edition $12.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.

"In this wry take on the post-apocalyptic horror novel, a pandemic has devastated the planet. The plague has sorted humanity into two types: the uninfected and the infected, the living and the living dead. Now the plague is receding, and Americans are busy rebuild­ing civilization under orders from the provisional govern­ment based in Buffalo. Their top mission: the resettlement of Manhattan. Armed forces have successfully reclaimed the island south of Canal Street - aka Zone One - but pockets of plague-ridden squatters remain. While the army has eliminated the most dangerous of the infected, teams of civilian volunteers are tasked with clearing out a more innocuous variety - the 'malfunctioning' stragglers, who exist in a catatonic state, transfixed by their former lives. Mark Spitz is a member of one of the civilian teams work­ing in lower Manhattan. Alternating between flashbacks of Spitz’s desperate fight for survival during the worst of the outbreak and his present narrative, the novel unfolds over three surreal days, as it depicts the mundane mission of straggler removal, the rigors of Post-Apocalyptic Stress Disorder, and the impossible job of coming to grips with the fallen world. And then things start to go wrong." - Publisher.
_______________________

Note to readers: The book prices quoted here are the Amazon.com prices in effect at the time of the blog posting. Please follow the links to the individual book to check the current price.


see more Lolcats and funny pictures, and check out our Socially Awkward Penguin lolz!

Just Out: Recent and Readable Nonfiction for the Kindle

What I like about non-fiction is that it covers such a huge territory. The best non-fiction is also creative. - Tracy Kidder.

Nonfiction encompasses a wealth of reading possibilities - history, essays, memoirs, scientific research, travel guides, cookbooks - essentially everything that is based on fact, real events and real people. Recent nonfiction titles for the Kindle that you might have missed:

Living Large in Lean Times: 250+ Ways to Buy Smarter, Spend Smarter, and Save Money, by Clark Howard, with Mark Meltzer and Thimou. Avery, 2011. Print Length: 272 p. Amazon customer rating: 4 stars (40 reviews). Kindle edition $9.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.

"Clark Howard is a media powerhouse and penny-pincher extraordinaire who knows a thing or two about money. A lifelong entrepreneur who is now the hugely popular host of a talk radio program and television show and the bestselling author of several books, Clark consistently delivers expert financial advice to his wide and devoted fan base. Living Large in Lean Times is Clark's ultimate guide to saving money, covering everything from cell phones to student loans, coupon websites to mortgages, investing to electric bills, and beyond. In his candid and friendly next-door-neighbor manner, Clark shares the small, manageable steps everyone can follow to build a path towards independence and wealth. Chock-full of more than 250 invaluable tips, the book outlines how to: locate missing and unclaimed money in your name, lower your student loan payment, find legitimate work-at-home opportunities, get unlimited texting and e-mailing for less than $10 per month, know what personal info not to post to social media sites, determine the best mortgage rate, and much, much more..." - Publisher.

Planet Word, by J. P. Davidson, with a foreword by Stephen Fry. Publisher. Print Length: 450 p. This title has complex layouts and has been optimized for reading on devices with larger screens such as Kindle DX, Kindle for PC/Mac, and Kindle for iPad. Amazon customer rating: none yet. Kindle edition $17.70. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.

"From feral children to fairy-tale princesses, secrets codes, invented languages - even a language that was eaten! - Planet Word uncovers everything you didn't know you needed to know about how language evolves. Learn the tricks to political propaganda, why we can talk but animals can't, discover 3,000-year-old clay tablets that discussed beer and impotence and test yourself at textese - do you know your RMEs from your LOLs? Meet the 105-year-old man who invented modern-day Chinese and all but eradicated illiteracy, and find out why language caused the go-light in Japan to be blue. From the dusty scrolls of the past to the unknown digital future, and with (heart) the first graphic to enter the OED, are we already well on our way to a language without words? In a round-the-world trip of a lifetime, discover all this and more as J. P. Davidson travels across our gloriously, endlessly intriguing multilingual Planet Word." - Publisher.

All Wound Up: The Yarn Harlot Writes for a Spin, by Stephanie Pearl-McPhee. Andrews McMeel Publishing, 2011. Print Length: 240 p. Amazon customer rating: 4 1/2 stars (10 reviews). Kindle edition $7.39. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.

"Inside All Wound Up, New York Times best-selling author and self-proclaimed Yarn Harlot Stephanie Pearl-McPhee spins her third yarn on knitting for the 60 million knitters in North America who collectively spend $45 billion a year on knitting-related merchandise. In her trademark style, McPhee talks about knitting, parenting, friendship, and - gasp! - even crocheting in essays that are at times touching, often hilarious, and always entertaining. Fans of her popular blog at www.yarnharlot.ca/blog/ will adore this all-new collection of tales of the woolen and silky skein, which follow the Yarn Harlot's previous exploits chronicled inside Yarn Harlot and Free-Range Knitter." - Publisher.

A Little History of Philosophy, by Nigel Warburton. Yale University Press, 2011. Print Length: 260 p. Amazon customer rating: none yet. Kindle edition $9.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.

"Philosophy begins with questions about the nature of reality and how we should live. These were the concerns of Socrates, who spent his days in the ancient Athenian marketplace asking awkward questions, disconcerting the people he met by showing them how little they genuinely understood. This engaging book introduces the great thinkers in Western philosophy and explores their most compelling ideas about the world and how best to live in it. In forty brief chapters, Nigel Warburton guides us on a chronological tour of the major ideas in the history of philosophy. He provides interesting and often quirky stories of the lives and deaths of thought-provoking philosophers from Socrates, who chose to die by hemlock poisoning rather than live on without the freedom to think for himself, to Peter Singer, who asks the disquieting philosophical and ethical questions that haunt our own times." - Publisher.

Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin: Forty Years of Funny Stuff, by Calvin Trillin. Random House, 2011. Print Length: 368 p. Amazon customer rating: 4 1/2 stars (3 reviews). Kindle edition $12.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.

"For at least forty years, Calvin Trillin has committed blatant acts of funniness all over the place - in The New Yorker, in one-man off-Broadway shows, in his 'deadline poetry' for The Nation, in comic novels like Tepper Isn’t Going Out, in books chronicling his adventures as a happy eater, and in the column USA Today called 'simply the funniest regular column in journalism.' Now Trillin selects the best of his funny stuff and organizes it into topics like high finance (My long-term investment strategy has been criticized as being entirely too dependent on Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes) and the literary life (The average shelf life of a book is somewhere between milk and yogurt.) In Quite Enough of Calvin Trillin, the author deals with such subjects as the horrors of witnessing a voodoo economics ceremony and the mystery of how his mother managed for thirty years to feed her family nothing but leftovers (We have a team of anthropologists in there now looking for the original meal) and the true story behind the Shoe Bomber: The one terrorist in England with a sense of humor, a man known as Khalid the Droll, had said to the cell, ‘I bet I can get them all to take off their shoes in airports.’ " - Publisher.

Killing Lincoln: The Shocking Assassination that Changed America Forever, by Bill O'Reilly and Martin Dugard. Henry Holt and Co., 2011. Print Length: 336 p. Amazon customer rating: 3 stars (128 reviews). Kindle edition $12.99. Text-to-Speech: Enabled.

"In the spring of 1865, the bloody saga of America's Civil War finally comes to an end after a series of increasingly harrowing battles. President Abraham Lincoln's generous terms for Robert E. Lee's surrender are devised to fulfill Lincoln's dream of healing a divided nation, with the former Confederates allowed to reintegrate into American society. But one man and his band of murderous accomplices, perhaps reaching into the highest ranks of the U.S. government, are not appeased. In the midst of the patriotic celebrations in Washington D.C., John Wilkes Booth - charismatic ladies' man and impenitent racist - murders Abraham Lincoln at Ford's Theatre. A furious manhunt ensues and Booth immediately becomes the country's most wanted fugitive. Lafayette C. Baker, a smart but shifty New York detective and former Union spy, unravels the string of clues leading to Booth, while federal forces track his accomplices. The thrilling chase ends in a fiery shootout and a series of court-ordered executions - including that of the first woman ever executed by the U.S. government, Mary Surratt. Featuring some of history's most remarkable figures, vivid detail, and page-turning action, Killing Lincoln is history that reads like a thriller." - Publisher.
_______________________

Note to readers: The book prices quoted here are the Amazon.com prices in effect at the time of the blog posting. Please follow the links to the individual book to check the current price.


see more Historic LOL